Archive for the ‘The life of VGS’ Category

Grand Theft Content

I faced a weird situation some days ago. Some content from this blog was being used on another blog. No credit was given, no link was to our blog was made available. Anyone that read those lines would easily assume that the owner of the blog wrote it. To make things worst he edited parts of the texts that would point to us.

But… he forgot one link and that one link created a pingback and that pingback led me to his blog where I left a very nice comment on the blog post I wrote and he edited. Some minutes later he took both our posts from the blog.

I got some mixed feelings about it. On one hand I felt good… after all, our content was good enough for someone to take it and pretend it was his. On the other hand I felt awful because that was plain theft.

We work mostly on the flash game market, meaning, we want our games to spread, so we want our games to actually be stolen from site to site. The very nature of our success is measured that way by our partners, clients and competitors analyse this.

So? Where do we stand? What’s the difference?

The difference is credit. I just love that all our games travel the world, but I would hate to know that we wouldn’t be credited for creating it.

We are usually careful about content we use that is not ours. But now we will double check everything. I wouldn’t like to have someone thinking we would be stealing there content for our own good, especialy now that I know how it feels when that happens to our own content.

The image above is a fine example. A nice WP plugin for free pictures does all the work for us, so even better!

Vlad out!

Contracts, games and Pedro

Hi everyone, Vlad here.

A lot of people has approached me on MSN lately wondering what we were up to since there was no news from us for some time. Our blog hasn’t been updated with the exception of Marco’s previous post, we haven’t used Twitter lately or done our daily visit to FGL.

Some have wondered if everything is ok and so on. Well, it is! I’m currently working on a big contract that we will let you know once it’s public. This contract is the major time consuming ‘thing’ that has made hide in our dev cave and one very nice addition to it is that it is using our Bold Pixel Engine framework, which means that we will release version 1 as soon as we deliver the project.

Marco is juggling several things. For starters, this contract also involves art… well actually it involves the whole product, so art is part of it. He has delivered all known assets and he is currently working with a programmer that is doing some really cool things for us. The name of this fellow is Pedro, so give him a round of applause because he really deserves it! Trust me, he does and you’ll know about it soon. Marco also worked on Palisade Guardian 2, which I’ve failed to announce… so… I owe Mark Loika that one!

So apart from the forced disappearance d in our dark dev cave, everything is well, right? Not really… M:A:D, the game that we’ve been talking about is completely stopped for the reasons mentioned above, which is kind of sad since it was going out really well and we are already aware that maybe some other projects will get a higher priority before we can resume its development. Can’t win it all can we?

So I guess this is just a heads-up for everyone and we’ll be back soon.

Did you miss us?!

Hi everyone, Vlad here…

I know it’s getting kind of an habit, but we don’t post too much when we are on deadlines or our work-meter is sky high which is exactly our current status. Still and given the amount of email we’ve received I decided to answer it today and lighten up a bit. Some stuff is still pending, so here are the categories of pending issues:

You said you were going to work with us on a project and you didn’t contact me back…

Although I’m slightly disappointed, I’m also used to it. People do this all the time! It’s your opportunity to catch me on MSN, Gtalk or email and sort things out. Feel free to do it, I’m really on a good mood today.

Your last email had the sentence “Rot in hell!”…

Several issues with this… I don’t really believe in the whole heaven and hell definitions, so I’ll just skip that. I also believe that mutual understanding is far better than spamming for attention. If I offer an helping hand but I don’t want to promote your website, than you should take the helping hand instead telling me to rot… sorta makes sense doesn’t it?

You are expecting an answer from me…

I think I cleared all the late email. If not, accept my apologies and contact me back.

You just miss us…

Oh… that’s sweet of you! We are rockin’n'rolling and although the current project doesn’t leave any room for showing things up or further developing other projects, such as M:A:D, we will try to keep in touch as much as possible, so see you soon!

Vortix Games on Twitter

With so many of the nicest flash game developers, portals, services and so on present on Twitter, we almost felt like we weren’t appreciating all they have to share.

So Vortix Games is now on Twitter, 140 chars at the time! Just click here!

We’re updating the whole “following” thing so in case we missed your twitter, let us know.

First Year of Flash Game Development: a Balance

I’m not aware of the exact date we said “We’re going flash games” but since I registered us on Flash Game License mid-July 2008 and our first game took about 6 weeks to be made, I would imagine that mid-June would be near the exact date.

I know it’s irrelevant, but I’m brainstorming so bear with me…

Technology was… refreshing!

Oh well, what to say… we used to work with Torque Game Builder and C++, mostly because Torque Game Builder had some… erm… issues. In those days, that damn thing didn’t know how to render a font on screen properly, so, to get a commercial game out, we couldn’t trust it and we needed to change the actual C++ engine.

Actionscript does have it’s issues also, first and foremost, it’s not a game engine, nor there’s any proper commitement from Adobe to change that. But game developers are used (and should be used) to make the wrong feel right and Actionscript is a bag of good suprises in that department.

Money was good!

Money is not only licensing… we did more stuff… but let’s start with the part that interests most developers.

Licensing

While I still believe that the topmost games of the casual download market space do make more money than topmost flash games. But download games take more time and more people. Another thing with the casual games is that it is a hit market and the vast majority of the money goes to a tiny minority of the people.

We released one download game and we were working on the second when we ran to an halt: we had a lot of proposals for distribution, none for publishing. If you don’t know what this means, basically we didn’t have any upfront money to work and that would kill us in a couple of months.

I would love to share with you real money values but under contract of the download game I cannot, therefor, I’ll give you comparasion figures. I calculated a revenue ratio:

revenue ratio = revenue / team members / months of development

Balloon Bliss has a revenue ratio of 1, because it’s what I want to compare with. Our first game, Tech Wars was a disappointment, mostly because we didn’t know what we were doing, but ok… still the revenue ratio is 1. This means that the revenue per month work per developer involved is exactly the same as a download game… hmmmm… for a game that is less market friendly.

Atomik Kaos and Atomik Kaos 2 have a ratio of 6 and 7.5 respectivelly and Lucy Swashbuckler has a ratio of 2.25.

Average is 4 times more revenue per team member per month worked than casual download market.

Contracts and Collaborations

We had some great ones and some bad ones, most of them were great ones though! Some of the contracts are yet to hit the web, which is a shame because we are very proud of them, but this section is about money so let’s cut the chase… is it good or not to have contracts and collaborations?

It depends… Using the exact same ratio, we had contracts that ranged from 1 to 10 and collabs that ranged from 0 to 36.72. The problem is that 0 there… some developers started projects with us, received assets and then dropped the project without a word. That’s nasty.

I think that we will have less collabs and more contracts in the future, which is ok I guess, but although a higher risk, it’s potentially more profitable to have a collab than a contract. Something we’ve discussed a lot is to what extent is more interesting to get these gigs instead of our own game development? On average our own game development is more profitable, but it has the highest risk, so I guess it’s a matter of balancing things.

Conclusions…

While we did more money per team member per month, we really need to sort how to balance between contracts, collabs and internal production.

Contracts offer 0 risk but lower income, internal production presents the higher risk with a potential higher income and collabs are somewhere in the middle. Since collabs were the more profitable the also the most problematic, I think that what we need to balance is internal vs contracts and leave collabs drop unless we get a really interesting project.

Visibility and contacts

Like it or not, a business is as viable as is it visible unless you are running some illegal thing, then it’s the exact opposite.

About a year ago our games were played by roughly ten thousand players. In a year we got around ten million players, that’s the equivalent to our country’s population, so kind of a milestone for us.

Our visibility, simply boosted and most of it happened because of the good people we had the pleasure to work with.

Flash Game License

All started here: please click here if you don’t know what it is… The services offered by the portal allowed all our primary and exclusive game sales, but it did not end there. Adam in particular has been always open to hear our complaints and suggestions and drive business our way. I’m sure we would do it sooner or later, but not has fast and as hassle free as while working with this wonderful group of people.

Portals

All the portals that worked with us. All, from the smallest to the biggest, have part in the visibility of our work but more important, all of them cared. I never felt that these portals were some faceless institutions that overloaded us with paperwork or false intentions. They wanted the best for their service and worked with us to deliver it. Sometimes it was possible, other times wasn’t.

I’ll open a new link section to be sure I don’t leave anyone out… and drive a little traffic their way too, why not?

Conclusion and future plans

This first year was very good. Next year is a bit edgy for us. We want to continue growing but we need to sort what our bets are and how we will manage somethings.

I don’t doubt for a minute that I’ll be here a year from now making a year 2 balance.

See you all soon,
Vlad

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